Will There Ever Be Another You

Lockwood (No One Is Talking About This) portrays the lingering effects of Covid-19 on a successful author’s body and mind in this scintillating narrative. After contracting the virus, the unnamed narrator suffers for many months from an array of debilitating neurological symptoms, including short-term memory loss. In an effort to regain her sense of self and return to writing, she attempts “to rewire my brain with mushrooms,” but succeeds “mainly in becoming temporarily psychic and reading Anna Karenina so hard I almost died.” Vignettes about life during the pandemic touch on the narrator’s family, her marriage, and the workaday realities of her profession—interviews, TV adaptations, and conferences where she feels out of place (“If all else failed,” she tells herself, “I could say things about Virginia Woolf’s heart problems”). Just as she seems to be recovering, her husband falls sick and must undergo several critical surgeries, reversing the roles of carer and patient. The narration oscillates between first and third person: “Some mornings she seemed true, and then she was I; some mornings she seemed false, and then she was she.” What remains consistent is Lockwood’s lyricism, as she renders her protagonist’s attempt to form meaning from a profoundly difficult ordeal: “The soul is a floor. It is there to bear us up and keep us standing, not merely to be clean.” The author’s fans will find her trademark humor, originality, and depth on full display. This is a knockout. Agent: Mollie Glick, CAA. (Sept.)